I started with 2007archive.pst, 2009archive.pst, 2010archive.pst, and outlook.pst 476MB in d:\outlook\ and duplicated in d:\outlook\bu\.

Outlook 2013 modified d:\outlook\outlook.pst lengthening it to 497 MB when I told it to import it. It also created c:\users\pajl\appdata\local\microsoft\outlook\outl ook.pst 543 MB.

In ControlPanel\Mail\DataFiles it shows this last file twice and has a check mark next to the first one. When I put the cursor on the first one and click Settings it says the operation failed. When I put the cursor on the second one and click Settings it reports the filename correctly as C:\Users\PAJL\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outl ook.pst and the format as Outlook Data File (97-2002).

It seems to consider the first file as the default, and it shows all my folders and messages, but it can't find folders to export.

I think I have to delete the file in users, move the original files to another directory, tell the control panel mail routine that its data will be in d:\outlook\outlook.pst , then copy the original outlook.pst from its temporary location to d:\outlook\, and then start Ourlook again and see if it finds it and can export it.

I've wasted about 9 hours on this Office2013 mess so far. I should really send a bill to Bill Gates. It took me about 35 minutes to install Office 2000 on the new Dell XP box 11 years ago. I set up IBM DisplayWrite on a 3090 MVS/VM 3.4 in 45 minutes back in 1986 and it immediately worked perfectly on about 8000 terminals. This is real progress.

Microsoft has been raking record revenues after record revenues and profits, year after year. They are absolutely dominant in the PC market, consumer and enterprise, but that is not that relevant to this discussion.

Does your default pst have contacts? Do you select the pst that has contacts, before trying the export?

Outlook 2003 is the point at which Unicode was introduced, and I suggest you view the discussion at Slipstick. Those of us who made the change ten years ago have mostly forgotten about it, or at least of when it happened, but your 2000 was the last version before that. And yes, making the change is a pain in the neck, but it only has to be done once, and once done the rest is easy. PhotoDraw 2000 is long-gone as well, so if you’re still using that you may want to find an alternative. On the other hand, save a few of your fonts, as several were dropped that you may want to keep in case you used them in a document (Pepita, Beesknees, Holiday, Vacation, and Almanac).

Office 2013 is still so new that I don’t think there are any published works or tutorials on it, although there may be stuff on YouTube. You can only obtain it through certain channels. Much of it is very close to 2010, and since you are making such a big advance you might learn a lot from material on 2010 and then revise it by checking the ‘changes in 2013’ at Microsoft. As for anyone’s learning it in nine hours… good luck with that.

You have a suite that is state-of-the-art that you got for next to nothing (and before the mob get their hands on it), and I think you would be missing the boat by not taking a shot at it. I expect we will be inundated with sources for learning it once it is officially out, but those of us who have it have a head start. (The kids next door got guinea pigs for Christmas.) You don’t have to learn it all – it’s gigantic – but it should be far superior to 2000 for your purposes.

The cloud may happen as a result of accepting default setups: with both Windows 8 and Office 2013 use the custom install, and choose your options carefully. A clean install is best, because it means there is no data on the computer to be whisked to the cloud before you can say ‘no’ or uninstall an unwanted connection you have had thrust upon you.

The link you posted to the Unicode discussion on slipstick is dead, but thanks anyway. As to saving fonts I doubt that I could since they would all be on the dead C: drive, but I doubt I'll need any, I seldom try to do anything fancy with fonts, and if I did I would probably do it in WordPerfect. Word formatting has been very unreliable for me. It's nice to know that I have something that is state of the art, but that is not what I was bargaining for. I wanted something that works and I've been trying to get this thing working for three weeks but I haven't yet. I did accept default setups during the installation. It has not tried to force me to send anything into the cloud yet. I don't think it will be able to whisk anything to the cloud either. I tend to cut power to the cable modem when I'm not actually on line. A dead modem is the best way to avoid malicious junk.

I'm just trying to figure out how to get this thing pointed to where I want my data and the best way to import the data from the old pst files.

You are apparently new to Windows 7 as well, and there are a million things there to learn about that. It has been around long enough now that your local public library is likely to have textbooks on it, and your own computer will provide no end of online sources, including the present site.

It helps to remember what belongs to Windows and what belongs to Office, because if you are dealing with something like fonts, then the source is Windows but the typography is Office. Windows 7 native font management can be seen HERE, for example, but if you have WordPerfect, of whatever (Corel) era, with its associated font set and possibly the Bitstream Font Manager that ships with some Corel products, then those are in no way incompatible, and the sum of the two is excellent.

Thanks for correcting the link to the UNICODE upgrade blurb. Printing my contact list using the old machine is not possible. Early in this thread I explained that my XP box c:drive boot sector went south but my outlook data was always on drives d: and e:. I can no longer run Outlook2000 on that machine.

I am not new to Winddows7. I have been running it for several years. I had been procrastinating about moving my email client to a new machine because Outlook2000 would not live with Windows7, even in a sandbox under 7Pro. I also avoided installing Outlook2000 on a Vista laptop I have because that OS is too much of a cludge for me ... my wife likes it.

2013 grid bars & keyboard shortcuts.

I'm using Word 2013 Preview, and don't have any problem with columns. However, in my docs, I underbar the Heading area, and overbar the footer section - the lines made using the grid sections (over, under, left, right, in between, and none - don't know what these are called). I've never had a problem with these until "2013 Preview" where these bars extended to the right edge of the "paper", past the right margin.

My solution was to magnify to 200%, then drag the right tab from the right margin/right indent to the left where it stopped, and then, holding Alt, dragging the right tab back toward the right margin/right indent to as close as I could get, but still not as far as those locations (thus the magnification to 200%, to get finer resolution in moving the right tab). The under and over bars no longer extended past the right margin.

I have not observed this problem (bar extending beyond margin or right indent) since December 2012, sometime. Since I'm using 2013 Preview, maybe I'm getting updated code periodically.
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Another thing you mentioned was "learning the ribbon". After over 20 years of being a very accomplished Office user, my productivity was instantly crippled by the ribbon. I can see how this might be a wonderful thing for anyone who doesn't know how to navigate menus, and I"m all for improving UI - User Interfaces - (Look at our Android devices today!). But to not provide the ability to use the traditional, static (or automatically hiding of options) menu interface so that decades of thoughtless muscle memory could continue to be exploited, was a severe change. As a result, I still use Office 2000 98% of the time.

I'm an old IBM Mainframer, and when terminals were introduced, keyboarding was the only UI. I eventually had to make muscle memory adjustments as emulators supplanted physical terminals, but I was still keyboarding 99% of the time, and beating anyone using a mouse, especially after locating keyboard shortcuts in Office, and improved my speed immensely with Office apps.

Well, if you've been using keyboard shortcuts in Office 2000, you're in luck. Office 2007, 2010, and 2013, while having their own, visible shortcut paths, will also respect the older shortcuts, but without any prompting. You have to know them well. For example, "Alt, t", while not visible in 2013 as a pick after hitting "Alt", will display a little "tool tip" encouraging you to continue with your keying from "an earlier version of Office" - but with no visible feedback of any kind - until you've arrived successfully at the end of the command. You've really got to have them down.

I've tried using the newer shortcut keys, but when you've made beautiful music on the piano - any piano - for 20 years, you can't suddenly play "Chopsticks" on a steel drum.

I've read the progress and tribulations with your main problem, and I appreciate the time you've spent helping your fellow man with the wealth of perseverance and experience available from Honored Citizens (Portlandia for Seniors). Good luck.

So you were with I'veBeenMoved. What are you doing in Portland ... Maine or Oregon? Wappingers Falls for seniors is now Geezer! I'm 5 miles from the microprocessor fab in East Fishkill and 7 miles from the mainframe plant in Poughkeepsie. I didn't work for big blue, I was the VP Engineering for PanAm when they shut down. Since then I've been rebuilding tugboats in Texas, doing database programming for charities, singing bass in the Camerata Chorale, and annoying other geezers around here.

I thought the donation of Office 2013 to one of my charities was going to be a big help, but it's turned out to be nothing but a time waster. I can't get Outlook to even start. It has something to do with the profiles you enter from control panel. I have one profile I can't remove. It says there are email hooks associated with it, but there are none. The other profiles point the data directory to d:\outlook\outlook.pst. Outlook will not start.

Word and Excel 2013 are no improvement over 2000. Word still messes up complicated formatting and is unusable for columnar newsletters. I have been using WordPerfect with good results for mail merge stuff. Both Excel 2000 and 2013 do all I need with spreadsheets.

I, like you, learned to use the keyboard with no mouse on terminals. PanAm had a 3090-200 in Rockleigh, NJ, and used Collins communication to get 750 Mbps throughput via Echo Star all the way to Bangkok and New Delhi, and that was in 1976! We never did move to emulators. We had 4000 terminals in NY and and additional 7400 terminals around the world. Taking my hands off the keyboard to wiggle my rodent is just a waste of time. I'm glad to hear that Word 2013 will use the legacy keystrokes, but I doubt that I will use it. (I bought a keyboard that clicks and doesn't have the windows key. It is made by the contractor that made the IBM keyboards back in the 1990s.)

If I can't get Outlook 2013 working I will install Outlook 2000 on my wife's Vista laptop, then use that to export the data files to Thunderbird. I hope all my contacts and messages survive the transition. I have the old pst files since they were on drives D: and E: on the dead machine. Alternatively, I could switch to a newer Office. Do you know which Outlook versions will live under Windows 7? I know that 2000 will not. That's what got me into this mess in the first place.

For crying out loud .... chopsticks on a steel drum .... LOL! That sounds like the jokes that GM executives used to make about re-installing the engine if you change the shoes you're wearing when you drive your car, or the tendency to steer suddenly off the road every 500 miles! PanAm used the MVS/VM 3.0 OS and we set a record with it .... it was up from December 1977 until December 1991 with a total of 17 seconds of unscheduled down time!!!

I was used the control panel > mail utility to insert a new profile pointing to the desired data directory (D:\Outlook\) and added my email ISP stuff to that profile. Something had originally created a profile pointing to Bill Gate's choice of data directory. I marked the new profile as default and then tried to remove Bill's profile. Windows refused to remove it saying that email accounts were associated with it.
I double checked and found no email accounts in that profile.

Then I tried to start Outlook2013 and it failed to start. It said it had stopped working and I would be notified if any solution was found. I repeatedly removed and added the desired profile. I repeatedly tried to remove the original default profile.

nothing has changed in the last week. Using the mail applet I created numerous new Outlook profiles, marked each one in turn as the default profile, and then tried to delete the original profile which Outlook had created. I still can't get Outlook to run.

I wonder if this could just be bugs in the Outlook 2013. It is very new and still has not been released to the public. Would you suggest that I now remove the entire Office 2013 and go back to 2007?

For conventional view zooming, try the slider in the lower right hand corner of the display. For the ‘problem’ of having a view that goes sideways, see below. You may find it to be a feature.

For users with touch devices, Touch Mode can be added to the Quick Access Toolbar by finding it in the list provided by the arrow to the right of the QAT, which is pretty darned obscure. That gives you a button on the QAT, which lets you toggle it. The result is a screen display that is more spread out, to help you use your finger to select things. You may notice that icons in the ribbon are smaller, for example.

Default view is Print Layout. This appears as an icon in bottom right corner. To the left of it is an icon for ‘Read Mode’ which will give you an uncluttered screen, with the ribbon and selection tools gone, and an arrow on the right-hand side of the screen (and left, where appropriate), which lets you scroll horizontally instead of vertically. You can collapse the sections by clicking the arrow to the left of the heading.

These are features if you have a use for them, and ‘features’ if you don’t. They appear to be among the enhancements included for touch device users. In this case, a swipe of the finger lets you move from screen to screen of text, which moves horizontally instead of vertically, which may make it faster to navigate in long documents. If you don’t like the view, you can either close your eyes or click on the icon to switch between Print Layout (vertical scroll, with ribbon), and Read Mode (horizontal scroll, no ribbon).

I can’t help with Outlook, but Slipstick is the best source I know of.